Mark Twain, Will Rogers And . . . Homer Simpson

They All Are Great American Humorists, Say Experts Calculating The Impact Of The Simpsons.

December 2, 2000|By David Kronke, Los Angeles Daily News

Last year, in one of those incessant end-of-the-decade/century/millennium issues that every publication was spitting out around this time, Time magazine proudly declared The Simpsons to be the best TV series of, yes, the century.

Matt Groening, the man who created Homer and his brood for The Tracey Ullman Show, was suitably impressed to mention this fact to an executive at Fox, the network The Simpsons virtually single-handedly transformed into a viable network almost a dozen years ago.

"This executive said, `Show of the century? I think it's the greatest show in the history of the world,' " Groening recalls with an incredulous laugh. "Well, yeah, but that Leonardo da Vinci cartoon was pretty good. . . .' "

Groening still manages to be self-deprecating about the impact of his cultural phenomenon, so we'll let someone else tout his achievement for him. Robert Thompson, the founding director of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Television, says flatly, "It's just a plain, good old-fashioned, incredibly funny product that doesn't compare just with other television programs, but with the best of American humor. Will Rogers, Mark Twain and The Simpsons can happily occupy the same stratosphere of respect in the annals of American humor."

And if that's not enough, Thompson adds, "Homer Simpson is one of the great creations in the history of Western drama.

"He's an Everyloser, a totally democratic doofus. He's like that character in the Hawaiian Punch commercials -- no matter how many withering blows he endures or bouts of toxic infection he takes, he keeps getting up to fight another day, almost in complete stupidity. There's something charmingly noble about this character -- if life will simply give him a doughnut every now and again, he's willing to accept horrors that compete with the Old Testament challenges of Job.

"When the show began, it centered on the bratty kid Bart, it was a little like Malcolm in the Middle," Thompson continues. "Not that Bart isn't important, but Homer is the soul of the series."

"What has the show done for American culture? What hasn't it done?" asks Ray Richmond, former Los Angeles Daily News TV critic and editor of The Simpsons: A Complete Guide to Our Favorite Family (HarperCollins; 1997), the bestselling TV book of all time. He continues: "At one time, Johnny Carson's Tonight Show was the satiric barometer by which we assessed the nation's social and political institutions. Since the mid-1990s, The Simpsons has seized custody of that role, in the process demonstrating a keener eye for irony and a more insightful, unflinching sense of absurdity than has anything that came before it."

Which is not to say that Richmond is a mindless Simpsons apologist -- he estimates he earned a pittance on the book while Groening's brain trust reaped a cool million.

Nonetheless, he offers the following reminiscence: "While doing the book, I continually clashed with one lackey of the Simpsons world over the fact that, in Simpsons scripts, whenever Homer intones, `D'oh!,' it is never spelled out as such. It is always denoted instead by the words `(annoyed grunt)' just like that, in parentheses. So this idiot kept badgering me to change any direct Homer `D'oh!' references from the show that were going to be listed in the book to `(annoyed grunt)' instead. This, of course, was totally absurd. No one would know what `(annoyed grunt)' would mean. But everyone knows `D'oh!' So I fought and fought with this know-nothing twit.

"Finally, I was told that Matt had interceded and sided with me. And the debate grew so fractious that the title of a Simpsons episode includes an inside joke that refers to it. There was an episode in season eight where a Mary Poppins-like nanny named Sherry Bobbins was hired by the family to help out Marge around the house. The title of the episode: `Simpsoncalifragilisticixpiali (annoyed grunt) cious.' I am so proud.

"I wrote a book that spanned 179 episodes," Richmond adds. "It was insane, marathon, back-breaking labor, akin to writing 179 term papers. With all of this immersion in Simpsons, by all rights I should have been sick to death of the show by the end. But I wasn't. I still never miss it. That alone speaks volumes."

Groening made a rare appearance Thursday at UCLA's Royce Hall. His presentation included a clip from a film his father (also named Homer) made in 1964 when Groening was a child. The film, a fairy tale his family concocted about children who help animals who "indicate their helplessness by making odd noises," stars Groening and his sisters, Lisa and Maggie. "You'll see the sneer on my face -- that's where Bart originated."